No matter how otherwise well-adjusted, serious runners have a fraught relationship with time. They scrutinize it, log it, trim it down to fractions of a second--even try to stop it in its tracks. Minutes matter when you're chasing records. Months are priceless. And years? Kevin Castille spent a decade selling crack cocaine in Lafayette, La., before he got serious about running. Not just any decade, but the prime of his life. On a timeline that he's written down for a visitor, the period beginning in 1992 and ending in late 2001 says simply: Streets.

Every second, minute, month and year he spends running now, at age 41, as he sets one American masters record after another--in the 3,000, the 5,000, the 10,000 and the 10-mile--is time reclaimed from the streets, where his 20s were lost. It should be no surprise that he now prefers training away from those streets, on a remote high school track a few miles from Lafayette's slowly drifting Vermilion, the rare river that can reverse the direction of its flow.

There he is now, at 9 in the morning, on a Friday in mid-October: a yellow blur running mile repeats at 4:48 pace around chest-thumping seniors playing on the grass at the center of the track, otherwise known as a football field. There's the smell of gasoline leaking somewhere nearby, the caw of a crow.

Kevin stops to apply heat cream to his legs, having completed four repeats at the prescribed pace. A large boy lumbers up and kisses him on his do-rag.

St. Thomas More is an expensive, predominantly white high school in Lafayette, not 10 minutes from Truman, the predominantly black neighborhood where Kevin grew up in the '80s, where the schools have been turned into correctional facilities. Kevin is the sainted coach of STM's cross country team, the Cougars. The kids worship him, text him, tease him, invite him to dinner with their parents, who love him nearly as much. The Cougars could win state this year.

But for a few hours each day, once the football players are gone, before the runners have arrived, the track is just his. He runs in circles. His mind runs in circles. He doesn't imagine crowds in the bleachers, or other runners gaining on him. He runs alone. He likes being alone. He's almost alone now, in fact. "If I had one more chance to fix that one race," he says, "it would have all been different."

He and the other kids in the neighborhood played on the train tracks, not knowing where they went. They hustled pralines--knocked on Truman's decrepit doors, sold them for a buck. They scavenged aluminum cans, too, trading them for change. They bought candy, little toys--things their parents couldn't afford. They never left the neighborhood, had no idea they were poor. They just knew they could sell anything.

Rubynell, Kevin's mother, had gone to New Orleans with another man shortly after he was born. Armand, his father, was a long-haul truck driver. So the boy lived with grandparents until second grade. Kevin never heard from Rubynell, nor about her from Armand, who'd gone to Vietnam at 17 and had spoken little about anything since. In third grade, the boy moved in with Armand and his new wife, who lashed him with a belt. Nine kids lived in that house.

Castille was raised from high school by two aunts, including Veronica (pictured)

Two aunts watched him from high school on. Veronica had a reliable job: She made salad at a local restaurant, eventually topping out at $12 an hour. She also had a sharp tongue. Mary was more gentle. Kevin went to a Pentecostal church with her four days a week: prayer, Bible study, choir, services. Eleven lived in Mary's little bungalow. Kevin shared a bed with three boys; they slept head to toe and prayed out loud.

"I just wanted to be visible," he says.

James Simmons saw him near the end of Kevin's freshman year: a silent boy, weighing less than 100 pounds, eating alone in the cafeteria. Few kids knew his name. Simmons coached track and field at Lafayette's Acadiana High School in the late '80s. Acadiana wasn't the closest school to Truman, but Kevin was bussed in thanks to new public school zoning policies. He wanted to be a pole vaulter. "I had trouble finding a skinny enough pole for him," Simmons says.

The coach made Kevin promise, as he did all his athletes, that he'd also run a minimum of two events during the season. At the first meet, he ran the 5,000m in 16:48. "I'm not telling you what to do," Simmons told Kevin afterward, "but I'd put that pole in the trash."

There were no athletes in Kevin's family, and his mechanics weren't great. But he enjoyed running and worked hard. That eliminated half of the coach's problem. The 2-mile became his event: He ran a 10:01 his sophomore year, 9:40 junior year, and 9:20 senior year, when he also managed a 4:20 mile. Kids called him "Simmons' Boy" now, but to the coach he was "Little Man." Simmons had made him into a runner, made sure he got decent grades, even paid for his eventual ACT exam.

Acadiana's team was having a terrific season in 1990, Kevin's senior year, led by the 5-foot-8, 118-pound kid with the flattop. Though still reserved, he took his teammates aside now to give them advice and led practice runs without being asked. They had a shot to win state. Kevin had become a top runner in Louisiana, bringing trophies home to a family who didn't watch him compete.

More often than not, his awards were for second place. Simmons had long told Kevin: Don't worry about Donnie . . . yet. But at regionals in 1990, he and Donnie Bernard, one of the top runners in the nation, had a photo finish in the 2-mile. He'd never come so close to beating his parish rival. He'd have done it, too, if he'd dipped at the finish line. Still, he was buoyed by the slimming margin of defeat.

So there they were at state. The gun went off and Kevin felt good, knowing what to expect, who was in the race and what they'd do. A few laps in, running well, a stab in his hamstring took him to the ground. A shot-putter carried him off the field moments later, says Simmons, "like a loaf of bread."

Kevin had earned three indelible letters: DNF. Did Not Finish.

Bernard won again, and Acadiana narrowly lost its bid for the championship. The golden season was over. Coach Simmons had always told his athletes: The way you perform in athletics is how you're going to perform in life. Most kids didn't listen to that coach crap, but it was gospel to Kevin. It was Truth.

He finally met his mother, just before graduating high school. She showed up at Mary's house around 1 a.m. on a school night, drunk. So that's why you've been gone my whole life, he thought. You don't give a shit. A few weeks later, his father refused to buy him a cap and gown, saying it cost too much. He still graduated, still went to college the next fall, and eventually ran again. But something in him had changed.

Kevin Castille at his childhood home in Lafayette.

It was the fall of 1992.

Kevin Castille was finishing his first season at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette, where he'd been recruited, after sitting out his freshman year. The system at ULL was new, the coach was, too, and he wasn't running well: 8K took him 27 minutes. He DNF'd more races now than he finished. Simmons' prophecy was playing itself out.

Most local students went home on the weekends, but he stayed in his dormitory. He didn't want to bother Mary anymore, and it was quieter here. There was a problem, though: His meal plan didn't cover weekends. One Saturday during his sophomore year, he bemoaned this fact to a teammate. The guy said he had a relative who dealt crack, the smokeable form of cocaine that had spread east from Los Angeles over the previous eight years, like white wildfire. It was easy to make and sell; a dose cost just a few bucks. You'll never have to worry about food again.

The drug was already common in Truman, but Kevin had never actually laid eyes on it until his teammate showed him some.

"Take this and sell it," he told Kevin. "Keep half the money and give me the rest." A quarter ounce of crack cost $250 and sold for $500. It was the easiest money he'd made in his life. If you want to eat, he thought, do what you need to do. It wasn't a regular thing at first. He told himself after each sale that he wasn't a bad person. But he knew what crack did: the broken teeth, blistered fingers, slurred and wheezing speech. He also knew he could get away with it. He was a celebrated local runner, quiet, nice. Not a pusher with a fancy car. He drove a 1980 Ford Pinto.

Soon he was slinging dope regularly, becoming the kind of person he'd despised in Truman. Maybe, he began to think, they'd just been in survival mode, too. Rationalizations came fast and fresh. Delinquency followed. He barely made it to practice now. His times slipped, his coach's faith wavered and teammates grew concerned. During a meet in Oklahoma, his friend and teammate Joel Chesimet was shocked to see him unroll a bundle of money on his bed.

He used the night to conceal his activities, employing magical reasoning: What people don't see won't kill them. In the back of his mind, Aunt Mary replied: What's done in the dark will come to light.

By the end of his first college season, he'd returned to staying at her house. Less back and forth from campus to sell drugs at night. The dark hours were long. The team van would pick him up for out-of-town meets at 5 in the morning, 30 minutes after he'd passed out.

But the money justified everything. He was working for himself, no gangs. Eventually he was seeing $10,000 a week in profit. He'd never been high, never been drunk. "But I knew," he says, "that I was getting just as high from the cash."

He went to them, mostly, men in their late 20s and older, white, black, working class. He didn't befriend them or learn their sad stories. He just kept their pipes full, even after his first arrest and conviction, in 1994, in Lafayette, for possession with intent to sell crack cocaine.

That day, he figured at the time, was the worst day of his life.

He was finally kicked off the team, little surprise to those paying attention. "Kevin's departure was slow and in drifts," Chesimet says. "It came in flashes of cars and absenteeism." For some, this ultimate dismissal would have signaled the time to straighten up, but he doubled down, despite increasing pressure.

Cops stopped him four times a week now: body-searched, Ford Mustang tossed, dogs barking and sniffing. More arrests, more lawyers. Team boosters stopped bailing him out. He moved around, living in more than a dozen places in the '90s--houses and apartments and hotel rooms--to keep junkies and robbers guessing. Coming home to a missing door was troubling, but not at all unusual. Sometimes everything was gone. He didn't mess with guns, but the crazy people came in shooting anyway. They knew he kept money inside.

By 1997, he'd had two daughters with two different women in Louisiana. Tavia and Kelnisha were, fortunately, kept away.

His family knew what he was doing. Well, at least as much as they'd known about his running--which was little. "You have to do something with your life," Mary now said. "You either gonna be dead or in jail." But even the woman he loved most couldn't stop him. If anyone were hurt from what he was doing, he told himself, it'd be him. This wasn't the life he'd wanted, but in a strange way he was happy. He had food, a place to sleep, and he depended only on himself.

He was home early on Halloween night, in 2001.

His pager kept buzzing, as usual, so he turned it off, got in bed, and was out as soon as the room went black.

Thump. Was someone kicking in the door? He glanced at the clock: 3 a.m. Jumping up, he headed to the hallway where there was yelling; something exploded in his face. He fell, landing on shattered glass. Fumbling in the dark, smoke filling his lungs, guns exploding around him, he heard voices screaming, "Stay down!" Suddenly, blinding light. Thank God, he thought, seeing his intruders. It was just the cops.

They had a search warrant, and he was arrested, again, for possession with intent to sell. This time, however, he spent 21 days in jail in Lafayette. It was cold, crumbling, crowded. Guys from Truman whom he hadn't seen in a while were in there; was it really Kevin Castille behind bars with them?

When he got out, he threw away his pager. The Ford Mustang--he'd had seven over the last decade--and the fancy clothes had to go, too. Mary reassured him: "Don't worry about losing things that really wasn't yours." A lawyer got the conviction expunged and he set about starting another new life. He got a job at a health club in Lafayette. And, tentatively, he began to run: 4 miles a day for a week. Then 5 a day.

It took a year to get comfortable. Kevin's fear of failing as a runner--of being lazy, not putting in the work, not measuring up to Simmons' standard--far exceeded his fear of returning to the streets. But he felt he had little choice. "Running," he says, "was my gift from God. It saved me once, and it would save me again."

Tom Hopkins helped build Kevin's confidence. Kevin first met Hop, as he calls him, in 1999, when the portly Irishman watched him DNF at a local 5K he had entered on a whim. Hop had run for the University of Southwestern Louisiana, now known as the University of Louisiana at Lafayette, in the late '60s and had once been capable of a 13:50 3-mile. Now he worked as a land man in the oil business, but he liked to nurture rare local talent like that possessed by Kevin--whom he'd been following, from a distance, since high school. He assumed a mentoring role in late 2001, when Kevin started to take running seriously again.

Hop loved that Kevin was born on St. Patrick's Day.

Gradually, through 2002, Hop built up Kevin's volume to 100 miles a week. No elite runners would let him join their group, he told Kevin, until he ran that much for 18 months. Hop got him to eat less fast food, sleep more, listen to endless stories of Irish luck. Finally, he let Kevin run local races to get some speed work.

He and Hop picked a 10K to see how it felt. It was raining and cold the day of the race. After a warm-up, Hop said to Kevin: "You're gonna destroy 'em!" Kevin ran a 31:00. Hop's reaction: "How the f---did you run in that weather?" He was nothing like Coach Simmons. But he was exactly what Kevin needed then. He ran a 25-minute 8K in October of 2002, after 10 years away from racing, and felt like he'd finally returned: "I was Lazarus," he says. "I'd been risen from the dead."

By early 2003, Kevin was taking classes at ULL again. He was also coaching at one of STM's feeder schools. Watching the kids smile as they ran, he realized that he'd lost that feeling. Simmons had always emphasized the fun part of running, unlike his college coach. It had just been about winning at ULL, crushing times, killing competitors; the soul of the sport had slipped away. He sought out Simmons now for more coaching advice: "Be honest with the kids," the coach said. "Don't tell them they can do something they can't. Love them. And be fair."

Kevin loved his kids. And he was fair and honest with them about their abilities, but--both here, at ULL and elsewhere--he kept his own story to himself.

"He doesn't tell you much," Hop says. "You have to see it, infer it. I love Kevin, but I don't know anything about his life." He pauses. "I wasn't done with Kevin, but I eventually let him go."

Kevin had decided he wanted a full-time coach; he briefly considered working with Eddy Hellebuyck, who hadn't yet revealed his dark truth about doping. But he went with a young guy in Oregon named Matt Lonergan, then coaching a group of post-collegiate distance runners in Eugene. They'd met in the fall of 2003, at the USA Running Circuit 10K nationals in Mobile, Ala., a race that Hop had pushed him to enter. Kevin had set a PR there, running a 29:36 on the road. Lazarus, again. He and Lonergan had exchanged contact info and developed a rapport. Lonergan was white and from Boston, where he'd grown up on welfare before becoming an elite runner himself. He was reserved, like Kevin, and mellow, like Simmons. Kevin decided to move to Eugene temporarily to train with him before the 2004 Olympic trials in the 10,000m.

"He was unknown," says Lonergan, now a coach at Northeastern University in Boston. "And he was running close to the professional athletes. I immediately saw he had a natural stride." But, after talking, Lonergan felt that Kevin's workouts were random and conservative. He added more volume and structure, working him out twice a week. (He's never charged Kevin for his services.) A favorite was 20 times 400m, at a high intensity. "The first couple times," Lonergan says, "he didn't finish."

Every other day of the week in Eugene, Kevin put in 14-16 miles, split between two daily runs: 7 a.m. and 7 p.m. This remains his schedule today. The clean, emerald streets of Eugene--filled with runners--felt like a different planet. He picked up a part-time lifeguarding job to make some extra cash.

He won a little 3K at Hayward Field, in preparation for the Stanford Invitational, the meet everyone was talking about. "But I was still a donkey at a derby," he says, "running on one leg and a prayer." He was 30 years old and had never broken 15:00 in a 5K or run a 10,000m on the track. But Kevin felt alive again. And, though he kept it to himself, he had a vision. He wouldn't disappoint Matt, or Hop.

Before the Stanford meet, he watched a video of the epic 2000 Olympic final in the 10,000m, in which Haile Gebrselassie barely catches a kicking Paul Tergat. Channeling the African men, he ran the first 5K at PR pace. Without being able to see the clock--he'd run out of contacts--he finished a second faster than the Olympic trials standard: 28:49, his first 10,000m on the track. He stumbled into a portajohn and cried for 20 minutes. When he emerged, he went for a cool-down.

The Olympic trials 10,000m was scheduled for July 9, 2004, in Sacramento, Calif. Making the trials--not the Olympics itself--was Kevin's goal when he'd moved to Eugene. He'd only been back running for a little more than two years now, after all. While his chances of getting in post-Stanford seemed assured, there were cracks in the plan. He'd had yet another DNF in Michigan, in June. He was low on money now, tired, stressed and suffering from a small strain in his abdomen. It had been a few days since he'd had two consecutive meals.

He'd arrived in Oregon with money from a fundraiser supporters had held for him back in Lafayette. He'd rented a room with it, bought his own food, made friends with a few other runners, and allowed himself to dream that his legs would make him rich and famous. I was running where Prefontaine ran! Six months later, he was nearly broke--he'd quit lifeguarding after his last check--and living with a friend who kept hens. He could bank on having an egg for breakfast, at least.

Now, driving south, Kevin was eating Little Debbie snack cakes. They were all he could afford in order to have enough gas money to get from Eugene to Sacramento. Lonergan said a USA Track & Field representative would call him on the way, to confirm his spot.

Two-thirds of the way to Eugene in his 1996 Pontiac Bonneville, three or four days into a deep hunger, his phone rang. It was an unknown number. "Hello?"

"Mr. Castille," the caller said, "we're sorry to inform you that you did not make it into the Olympic trials." There were more words, which he couldn't process. Then a click.

I'll just go home, he thought. Breathing deeply, a familiar feeling rising in his chest, he called Lonergan. His coach couldn't believe it; there must be some mistake. He'd read the declaration list after the entry deadline had passed, and he was almost positive Kevin would make it, by the skin of his teeth, into the field. Had they allowed some big names to register after the deadline, squeezing Kevin out? Lonergan made a call.

A long hour passed before another call to Kevin's phone. It was the same woman. He was in. He pointed the car back toward Sacramento, considering the familiar questions in his life: Where do I sleep? What do I eat? Check-in wasn't until the next day. When he arrived, he found a place to park and went for a run to clear his head. A ticket sat on his car when he got back.

He looked for another place to park and rest. He'd never been in Sacramento and didn't want to get in more trouble, but what else could he do? He finally lay down in the back of the Bonneville with his blanket and a pillow. Lying there, looking at the stars through the window, the words came: Not quite what you expected, huh? He slept for maybe 45 minutes. Feeling the warmth of the California sun in the morning, though, he was optimistic.

Lonergan arrived and offered him some food and an extra bed in his hotel room. He stood on the starting line the next evening, full of hope and his coach's words of encouragement: It's just a test of your fitness, Kevin. But once again, the three dreaded letters materialized halfway through the race. He'd strained his hip flexor toward the end of his six intense months of training prior to qualifiers, and it had flared up. But he refused this excuse for another DNF. He was just mentally weak, not ready.

He returned home, gave his body a break, and didn't speak of this race for years, not even to Lonergan. Being quiet men living in different states, not given to small talk on the phone or elsewhere, they got into a habit of texting each other rather than talking. It's usually just a few efficient sentences noting a big race coming up, a finished workout, an occasional life event, like moving.

Kevin lived with Hop for a month before finding an apartment and a roommate. With his own place in Lafayette, he finally became a father to Kelnisha, 7, whose mother was having trouble caring for her. His days began to resemble those of a normal parent: He went for a run, took his daughter to school, went to work at a local gym, picked her up from school, made dinner, and, whenever possible, tried to get to know this quiet girl with the long runner's legs.

Kevin stopped training for six months, to recover from a hip injury, and returned to coaching part-time. He moved from lifeguard to personal trainer 50 hours a week, too, which allowed him to put Kelnisha in a good school. Meanwhile, he went back to college at ULL, where he graduated in 2006 with a general studies degree that he'd paid for himself.

He hadn't run a lot during the two years it took him to earn it--he rarely raced farther afield than New Orleans, where he could make a little money--but he was prouder of the diploma than his racing medals and awards; nobody else in Truman had a college degree. Hoping to return to form now, he went back to Eugene to train with Lonergan in person for eight months--Kelnisha returned to her mother--but his 80- to 100-mile weeks weren't working, and he felt unfocused. So, in 2007, he moved to Long Beach, Calif., where he coached a high school team and ran poorly. In May of 2008, he headed back to Lafayette and the gym, "king of the small hill." He was doing double runs now, five days a week at a minimum.

He moved to Kentucky with Kelnisha in 2010, to be with a woman he loved. She worked as a nurse and they lived well. He could focus entirely on running and raising a child. But, ultimately, he felt "marriage wasn't for me," and he broke off their engagement, returning to Lafayette in 2011 ready to give running everything he had. He upped the mileage to 120 a week, deciding he could handle more pain, like the runners he'd met on a trip to Kenya with his college roommate, Chesimet, the previous fall. He ran a 3K PR of 8:11 in early 2012, and a 14:01 5K the next week. He was 39 and doing things he hadn't been able to do 10 years earlier.

Lonergan told him to gear up for the Stanford Invite again--which would fall after his next birthday--this time as a masters runner. "I'd follow Matt to the pits of hell," Kevin says, "and sometimes that's how his workouts felt." He ran 28:57 in the 10,000m at Stanford in the spring of 2012, setting a new American masters record, which he bettered last April, running 28:53. Over the past two years, he's set American masters distance records from 3,000m to 10 miles on the road.

Simmons--whom Kevin was too ashamed to face when the coach visited him in jail--has watched all this with pride. "It's like when Mike Tyson was boxing," he says. "Tyson was OK as long as he was in the ring. When he wasn't in the ring, that's when he got in trouble. I told Kevin, 'As long as you're running, you're good.' "

"Remember, but don't dwell," Kevin says inside his Ford Explorer, driving through Truman in early fall. He's wearing a black do-rag, a yellow running shirt, bright orange track shoes and black running tights. "Yes," he laughs, "I wear tights all the time. What man walks in a grocery store with full-length tights on? At first, Kelnisha was like, 'Are you gonna put clothes on?' I'm like, 'Nope.' I don't have to hide who I am. This is what I do. Eventually she was just like, 'Whatever.'"

Country music plays on the car radio, about a woman far away. Kevin hums along. A man on a street corner gives him a familiar nod. Leaving the neighborhood, he passes a Lesspay Motel, a Piggly Wiggly, an Able Pawn. Truman is perpetually dying.

Mary's been dead for a few years now. But Veronica is feisty as ever. He just spent an hour on her falling-down front porch; at 75, she still can't read but loves to talk. Armand was there, too, smoking. He's on his fourth marriage, has had triple bypass surgery, gets dialysis three times a week for kidney problems, has had a morphine pump in his body for more than 20 years. He nodded absently as Veronica ribbed Kevin: "Don't know what girls like about them legs!"

As Veronica talked, Kevin texted Lonergan. Two weeks earlier, Kevin ran his marathon PR, a 2:20:58 at Twin Cities (see photo below), where he came in second in the masters category. For the last two years, all Kevin's income has come through racing, just less than $30,000 in 2012; he made $7,000 at Twin Cities. He runs wherever Lonergan suggests, two races most months.

LONERGAN: Still up for the 12K or should we take our time getting back into it?

KEVIN: Yes im good for it! Been planning for months lets get that record and move on.

LONERGAN: K. Tomorrow I was thinking of 3ez, strides, 4×Mile @4:50–55 with 2:00 recovery & 8×200 @33,3ez warm down. Just to get the legs moving. We can push next time.

But after considering the 12K championships--which, it turned out, paid only $100 to the masters winner--he turned his attention to the half marathon championships in late January. He wants to set long-distance records most of all right now, and he's proceeding without delay: "There is no later."

He has set his masters records in the past two years with that mantra. And he's done it without speaking to his coach ("That doesn't matter; he can guess my race pace before it even happens"), without sponsors ("That hurts me none whatsoever"), while raising Tavia, who is 19, and Kelnisha by himself and living in one of the least likely places to train. Lafayette is 36 feet above sea level, and the average July temperature is above 90 degrees. Four thirty in the morning and 10 at night are the only tolerable times to train, so Kevin simply acknowledges he has to "get up early and go to sleep late."

From a distance, Lonergan remains Kevin's compass. "We're still trying to run faster than he ever has in his life," Lonergan says. "That's what keeps him going. He's trying to improve on times we've been chasing for years." (Marks he ran for 10K, 15K and 20K in 2012 and 2013 are pending certification as masters records.)

Hop, of course, wants another chance to coach Kevin, whose promise he saw long ago. The optimistic Irishman thinks Kevin can still run a 2:14 marathon, a 13:30 5K and even a 4-minute mile--which few masters runners have come close to yet. But Kevin feels like Lonergan knows him--as a runner--as well as he knows himself. So Hop remains a beloved booster, pushing Kevin to do things others don't believe.

The more records he breaks, the more he's been accused of using performance-enhancing drugs. (He has never failed a test.) The LetsRun message boards are full of anonymous suspicion. Even Hop's friends openly wonder: How did this guy seem to come out of nowhere and suddenly start winning so much? It must be that he's juicing. Kevin thinks it's funny, in a way, given that he handled crack cocaine for a decade and never used the stuff. People, he says, think he came out of nowhere, but they don't know about Acadiana, or ULL, or his decade off, or how hard he works now.

"I don't have a secret training system," he says. "I just do what Matt sends me." He runs twice a day six days a week, with a long run on the seventh: 110–125 miles. He doesn't eat much: a peanut butter sandwich before a morning run, fruit for lunch, chicken and a vegetable for dinner. He rests going into a race. "Everybody does the same type of workouts," he says, "but if I can do workouts faster than you, then I can run races faster than you."

Mbarak Hussein, 48, the great masters runner who beat Castille by 37 seconds at Twin Cities this year, has known and competed against Kevin since 2011. He says that training like an open runner comes at a cost. "Right now he's stronger, he's younger, he's faster," Hussein says. "The only thing is, Kevin needs experience in the marathon. I mastered it when I was 37. Once he masters the longer training--focusing less on the 5K and 10K, which comes at the expense of the marathon--he'll run very fast."

For his part, Lonergan won't let him cut the speed work. He does mile repeats from 4:30–4:50. Two weeks out of the Twin Cities marathon, he's running 4:48s. "He won't let me settle for bullshit miles," says Kevin, "just because I'm 41."

It's mid-October and the Cougars are competing at a meet in Alexandria, La., 80 minutes north of Lafayette. Kevin is on the road before 6 a.m. Kelnisha, a freshman at STM now--her tuition is covered as compensation for Kevin's coaching duties--is asleep in the back. Kevin talks, backlit by a full moon, about the trip he took to Kenya with Chesimet in 2010. He'd never left the states and wanted to see Africa, to train with Kenyan runners: More than once, he found himself alone in a far-off field, wondering how he'd get back. But he got his hair braided there for $2. And he saw a guy on a scooter carrying a live goat. The runners called him kijana. Someone said it meant young man. "But," he explains, laughing, "it actually means uncircumcised boy." He came back home believing he could run a half marathon in 65 minutes, and he did in 2012 in Philadelphia.

Castille coaches cross country at St. Thomas More, where the girls won the state title in 2013.

When the meet starts, he jogs alongside his young runners, outside the course boundaries. "Don't run side by side," he tells them. "Push each other . . . Taste the front of the pack . . . Take a breath, you're fine, eyes up . . . Break up the girls in red! . . . Watch your chin!" One girl finishes in 19:30. Another nearly passes out at the finish line. Kevin gives each kid personal feedback afterward. The top boy, who finished in 16:54, should have sped up his second mile.

The girls finished second and the boys finished fourth, a good showing, early in the season. A senior named Patrick Bernard explains why he likes Kevin: "The previous coach didn't make you wanna run. He made you wanna quit."

Back home, Kevin takes a nap. He recently returned to work as a personal trainer in Lafayette part-time, and he tries to sleep a few hours during the day. On the porch of his apartment, where he's lived since August, there's an old exercise bike, a treadmill, a dips bar. Inside his bedroom, little more than an altitude simulator tent for sleeping--one of his few extravagances, along with his iPhone, purchased after a trip to Colorado--with a small air mattress inside the plastic walls. He hasn't had a real bed since 2003.

He sleeps at 10,000 feet to build up useful red blood cells, yes. But also to feel as far away from his past as he can. He wishes he could move somewhere else to train, but says, "If you can't, you can't. I won't abandon my kids. There comes a time when you have to break the cycle." He only returns to Truman now to cut Veronica's grass.

In mid-November, STM's girls cross country team won state and the boys--who weren't expected to do quite as well--placed second. "After a mile," he says of the boys, "they were probably holding a fourth place at best, but I know the boys are finishers.

He pauses. "I've preached for a long time about the ability to finish."